Back to the streets

· There is a troubled space between how immigrant writers are seen and how they see themselves, especially when they tap into an ongoing news story, as 19-year-old Faïza Guène discovered when she published her first novel, Kiffe-Kiffe Demain, last year. The daughter of North African immigrants to Paris herself, she wrote about the daughter of North African immigrants in Paris, Doria, whose father returns to Morocco in search of a younger wife who can give him sons. There were immediate attempts to co-opt Guène into being the acceptable spokesperson for the disenfranchised North African immigrants of suburban Paris. But even when riots erupted a few weeks ago, she would have none of it. It wasn't as if she was denying reality - "For a TV show everything is all glittery and shiny. Then you go home and the elevator is broken and the hallway smells of urine!" as she told one newspaper. It's more that "I was sick and tired of hearing only black stories about the suburbs, so I wrote about the trivial, daily things that happen here ... " She sold 180,000 copies in hardback.

· That was in 2004; foreign rights for her book have now been sold in 22 countries and it is to be published here next year as Just Like Tomorrow. The book offers unusual challenges because of her use of language, her English translator Sarah Adams told Radio 3's The Verb last week. Guène uses Verlan, or backslang, spoken in the banlieu: words are cut in half and flipped (Verlan is what happens when this is done to "à l'inverse"), then garnished with Arabicisms. The title is an example of the latter influence: Kif-kif is a term French soldiers brought back from Algeria, which "means more of the same", says Adams; add "demain" and it means "same shit, different day". "Kaif", however, is Arabic for wellbeing, and in the banlieu "kiffer" has come to mean to fancy, to rate, to get turned on by: the title then becomes both optimistic and pessimistic. And all rather tough to render into English. Adams' solution was to look to the street slang of her own neighbourhood, Brixton, in London, but she is careful to point out that rather than swapping one immigrant culture for another, she has looked for a believable "urban street language in a developed western country. You want something that sounds authentic and not translated."

· Meanwhile, in LA, The Simpsons are taking on literature: Tom Wolfe, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen and Gore Vidal will all appear, providing voice-overs, next year. Vidal is the only one who does not meet a sticky end under a runaway granite boulder. "Franzen's scream has a hint of falsetto," said the LA Times this week. "Chabon writhes as he lets out an anguished moan." Wolfe had a little more trouble getting into the part. "He screams softly, this southern gentleman, his trademark white suit unwrinkled, his spats unwavering even as a giant granite boulder hurtles down upon him ... 'Aaaaaaaahh! Wait, no, that wasn't good, let me start over'.